In the past few days, I’ve seen prolonged verbal brawls on India1α  Twitter. When kids on a playground fight, teachers show up to separate the quibbling bunch. When a bar brawl breaks out, friends and bystanders will separate the quarrelling parties. Twitter is the perfect place to engage with strangers and start brawls . Unfortunately, it has no mechanisms to mediate them. No adults show up. Interacting with fire threads means becoming part of the problem and letting your mentions eat away your mental peace . We end up with factions liking tweets of opinions they favour and sending endless replies to opponents. The brawl doesn’t end but fizzles out. People get bored or distracted by the next outrageous thing.

So, what should you do if you’re in a Twitter brawl?  Disengaging is one option. If you feel the other party is not making a good faith argument or being disingenuous, it’s best not to feed the troll. Sometimes, there’s light at end at the end of tunnel . If there’s genuine intent and interesting ideas, you should do the exact opposite_._ Get a room and have a conversation. Listen patiently, understand the flaws or assumptions in your argument, chew on an unfamiliar perspective, and walk out smarter . Let Twitter be the last place where you attempt this. It favours succinctness, and wit over complexity, and nuance, things that caused the problem in the first place.

This structural challenge brings back not-so-fun memories from work. Many times, I’ve found myself in never-ending email/chat exchanges. Someone will express a raw or incomplete idea . Someone else will proceed to misunderstand it. A third will bring up tertiary concerns. The conversation descends into ever-lasting bickering and goes nowhere . In those moments, it’s prudent to pull the plug and have a direct conversation. Get a room and thrash things out. Have a call, do a meeting, pull up a whiteboard and draw some Venn diagrams, whatever.

TL;DR - If you have a twitter fight worth fighting, get off twitter and get a room.